A search for 2026 and AI concerns is, uh, concerning. It’s a bubble, it’s a risk, it’s an international safety issue, it’s a trust issue, it needs to be regulated by the government, and so on. And that is just this past month! But has the ship already sailed? If 90% of Google tech workers use AI at work, 50% of AI agent usage is in software engineering, 90% of software developers use an AI coding assistant at least weekly.
History repeats itself, repeatedly. The history of technology reveals a laundry list of tech introductions, mistakes, resets, and fear of change. Particularly the fear of job losses. Most recently, the introduction of voice technology raised privacy fears. But long before that, browser wars threatened a company’s existence. Enterprise software packages (SAP’s ERP for example) threatened individual product companies in the 1980s. And cloud computing offerings came along and threatened SAP. And ironically, SAP itself is threatened by the support requirements for its own legacy products, particularly in manufacturing.
What is different now? Long ago, the general media could not care less about the software industry. It was a behind-a-wall world that consumers did not need or want to know about – and the general media obliged. Desktop software was the major 1980s change – creating partners out of competitors. Today, a much-reduced and challenged media industry is searching for clicks – and AI hype (and fostering AI phobia) fits the bill.
Technology life goes on – and no one will really notice. The well-publicized risks of generative AI have, naturally, generated risk mitigation business for the big consulting houses (‘while keeping the future in mind’) and tech firms like IBM. Like all previous tech fear-mongering eras, this too shall pass. One day we will notice that all of our technology activities (see Search) are built around AI tools. We will accept that change (really, because we will not have any input about it). Life will go on.
